11–15 of 15 posts
People put too much junk in their logs. Most logs are irrelevant. Companies have businesses selling logging solutions. They sponsor developer conferences hiding this simple truth. Just say no to the logging industrial complex.
>Engineers have to pre-define and send all telemetry data they might need – since it’s so difficult to make changes after the fact – regardless of the percentage chance of the actual need.
YES. Let them send all the data. The best place to solve for it is at Ingestion.
There's typically 5 different stages to this process.
Instrumentation -> Ingestion -> Storage -> Query (Dashboard) -> Query (Alerting)
Instrumentation is the wrong place to solve this.
Ingestion - Build pipelines that allow to process this data and provide for tools like streaming aggregation, cardinality controls that allow to 'process it' or act on anomalous patterns. This atleast makes working on observability data 'dynamic' instead of having to go change instrumentation always. Storage - Provide blaze (2hours), hot(1 month), cold(13 months) of tiered data storage with indipendent read paths.
This, in my opinion has solved for the bulk of cost & re-work challenges associated with telemetry data.
I believe, Observability is the Big Data of today, without the Big Data tools! (Disclosure: I work at Last9.io and we have taken a similar approach to solve for these challenges)
People put too much junk in their logs. Most logs are irrelevant. Companies have businesses selling logging solutions. They sponsor developer conferences hiding this simple truth. Just say no to the logging industrial complex.
1. https://www.komu.engineer/blogs/09/log-without-losing-contex...
A lot of words without any concrete proposals on how to solve the problem. Telemetry is captured because after-the-fact analysis can’t be done retrospectively otherwise. If you can solve that time travel problem, people would capture less telemetry. I think the key thing is if you can do anomaly detection to capture the rare events because 90% of telemetry is garbage happy case telemetry that doesn’t really give you…
(author) I agree that solving both time travel and anomaly detection is very important and is in my opinion the solution to this problem, but I was trying to keep this post focused on the problem itself. I will be writing some follow up posts on potential solutions. Thank you for reading and commenting!